Chapter 30 - The Box Beneath the Floorboards
Three days later, the blizzard was finally a memory, the city buried beneath mounds of melting gray slush.
I sat inside the glass-walled office of my new commercial suite in the Seaport District. The lease was paid in full for two years. The software patents were entirely, irrevocably in my name, signed off by the federal bankruptcy trustee after the St. Jude's audit was finalized. My developers were back at their desks, the rhythmic clicking of keyboards outside my office door the sweetest symphony I had ever heard.
For the first time in twenty-five years, nobody owned me.
Arthur was awaiting trial at a high-security facility, looking at fifteen years. Eleanor had been declared legally incompetent and committed to a closed psychiatric ward, her days of playing the grand suburban matriarch reduced to hospital gowns and chemical sedatives. Julian Thorne was facing forty counts of wire fraud, racketeering, and conspiracy to commit murder.
I pulled open the center drawer of my new desk.
Inside lay the yellowed birth certificate I had pulled from the lake house floorboards.
*Mother: Sarah Anne Linley.*
I had spent seventy-two hours running private background checks on that name. Sarah Linley had been a twenty-two-year-old art student in Boston when Arthur met her. She had died in a private clinic outside Montreal three days after giving birth to me. The official death certificate listed complications from an emergency cesarean section.
Arthur had paid the hospital two hundred thousand dollars to seal the records. He had paid Eleanor’s silence by giving her complete control over the family trust.
I picked up my pen, ready to shred the document, to burn the last tether tying me to the nightmare of the Vance bloodline.
Suddenly, my desk phone buzzed.
I tapped the speaker button. "Yes, Marcus?"
"Claire, you need to turn on the news right now," Marcus Vance’s voice came through the line, tight, breathless, and stripped of all his usual corporate composure.
A cold pit formed in my stomach. "What happened? Did Julian post bail?"
"Not Julian," Marcus whispered, his voice trembling. "Framingham State Hospital just had a perimeter breach during the morning yard transfer. Two guards were poisoned with cleaning chemicals from the laundry bay."
I stood up, the leather chair rolling back against the glass wall. "Eleanor?"
"She’s gone, Claire. She vanished into the woods behind the facility forty-five minutes ago," Marcus said, the terror bleeding through the receiver. "The state police just searched her room. She left a message carved into the drywall above her bed."
"What does it say, Marcus?"
There was a long, suffocating pause on the other end of the line, the sound of Marcus drawing in a jagged, terrified breath.
"It says: *She wasn't the first. Look in the cellar beneath the greenhouse.*"
Before I could speak, the private elevator at the end of the executive hallway chimed with a heavy, mechanical chime.
The indicator light above the frosted glass door shifted from green to red.
May you like
The power to my entire floor died, plunging the office into pitch-black silence, save for the emergency exit lights glowing like drops of fresh, chemical-red blood against the floor.
Through the dark corridor outside my office, the heavy, deliberate drag of boots over tile began to echo, drawing closer, step by agonizing step... and then, from the blackness, a woman began to hum the nursery rhyme Eleanor used to sing before she locked me in the dark.
